Masterminders

by Tara Basi

  “They’re over there by the bins, good. Right, follow my lead, and help me over to the Power 3.” With that Bobby draped himself over my shoulder as though he could hardly walk. I half dragged him across the playground.

  “I couldn’t help it, he… he… did things, horrible things, you’ve got to believe me,” Bobby squeezed out between gasps, groans and wheezes.

  “What are you talking about, what happened to you?” Madge asked looking quite shocked at Bobby’s appearance. Even Tony and George were staring open mouthed.

  “It was the WAD, it was… agony.”

  “What? What’s a WAD?” Madge asked

  “Shhh, not so loud, he’s watching,” Bobby whispered and then shivered.

  “Make sense, who’s watching?” Madge whispered in response while looking around.

  “He doesn’t like what you did, spiking his stories. He tortured me, I couldn’t help it, I… I told him everything. Take this, he said he’d cut off my fingers if I didn’t give it to you,” Bobby shrieked getting more and more hysterical as he thrust the envelope at Madge.

  Madge slowly opened the manila envelope and looked inside cautiously.

  “What’s in it, what’s he say,” George asked, looking quite anxious.

  “There’s a picture. Oh god, it’s you and me Tony, in the Sick-Bucket car park changing into our disguises for the Brain Chewers concert. And, there’s a note,” Madge held it out so we could all see it. It was like one of those kidnapper’s notes you see on TV, written in cut-out letters from magazines. I’d always wondered what Bobby had done with the picture he took in the car park that night.

  ‘I’m watching you. Repent.

  Wiki-Alien-Diet’

  “We’ve got to tell the police, my mum and the nuns,” George blurted, looking close to tears. It was a wonderful sight.

  Just then the heavens opened and the rain crashed down. Nobody moved, we stood silently in a circle staring at the note, as if we’d been glued to the ground. I looked at Bobby for guidance and almost screamed. His ‘black eye’ was running. I whipped him around quickly and dragged him in to the school before the Power 3 noticed anything.

  That afternoon break, during a lull in the rain, the Power 3 cornered the two of us in the playground.

  “What happened to your eye, and all that blood?” Madge asked straight off with her usual nose for a scam.

  “Antibiotics,” Bobby replied straight-faced.

  “Who is this WAD?” Madge said, continuing her probing.

  “I told you before, he’s ex-Special Forces, no one knows his real identity,” Bobby answered, while flinching convincingly at the mention of WAD.

  “Didn’t you see him, when he was beating you up?” Madge was unrelenting.

  “He had a balaclava on, I only saw his crazed eyes and pointy teeth,” Bobby answered with a shiver of fear.

  “We should tell the police,” George squeaked.

  “He’s watching,” Bobby cautioned, while sneaking a surreptitious look around the playground.

  “It all smells fishy to me. You two are up to something, and I ain’t scared of no WAD,” Madge hissed. She poked Bobby in the chest with her finger as she spoke, and I couldn’t help thinking it might be nice if she’d poked me as well.

  “What’s WAD mean – repent, repent what?” Tony asked. He looked a little less confident than Madge, but definitely more together than George who was visibly wobbling with fear.

  “Your sins, I guess, the bullying stuff he was writing about for the Vanity Times that you got me to censor. I don’t know. He didn’t tell me anything. Anyway, I don’t care what you believe, he’s not after me,” Bobby answered smugly, while at the same time looking hurt that Madge could possibly doubt his word.

  “Where did he take you,” Tony pressed, grabbing hold of Bobby’s jacket by the collar.

  “It was dark; he jumped me on the way to school. I think it was the old hut near the swamp-bog. Yeh, definitely, the hut. It might be his base,” Bobby spluttered, trying to free himself from Tony’s grip with little effect.

  “Listen pig-face, my brothers are back from Afghanistan for Christmas. Thursday night we’ll be waiting for dick WAD at the bog hut. We’ll see how tough he is up against two marines. You’re coming with us. No WAD and my brothers will want to know why,” Tony said, pressing his face close to Bobby’s.

  With the interrogation of Bobby over, the Power 3 wandered off to the sounds of Madge and Tony telling George to get a grip.

  “Bobby it’s all gone wrong. Tony’s brothers are probably bigger versions of him. Monsters. What’re we going to do?” I suddenly felt very scared.

  “Calm down, it’s all going exactly to plan,” Bobby answered quietly.

  “That’s good, but what is the plan.”

  “It’s a dynamically evolving asymmetrical counter-terrorism strategy which is constantly being adapted to the prevailing circumstances and latest risk assessments, but, more importantly, we still need a martyr,” Bobby explained.

  “A make-it-up-as-you-go-along type plan?” I suggested, hoping I was wrong.

  “That’s how an amateur revolutionary might describe it, but now’s not the time for idle philosophising. We’ve only got two nights to get the hut ready. You’re going to be very busy Terry.”

  And so I was. At midnight I sneaked out of the house wearing my mum’s cycle cape, covering me and two rucksacks, one on my chest the other on my back. I slogged my way up to the hut through the freezing rain and a howling wind trying to rip my cape off. Only the weight of the rucksacks kept me grounded. My head torch cut a wet sparkly beam through the dark, illuminating all the worst puddles, moments after I’d stepped into them. I arrived at the hut, about two kilometres outside of town, exhausted and with full Wellingtons. The old black hut sat on a slight mound at the edge of the bog. It had one small mucky window with cracked glass next to a warped old door, barely clinging on to its rotten frame. It must have been a quite a nice hut years ago, before it started leaning towards the bog and slowly sinking. Boards had cracked, the wood was rotting away from the ground up and its roof was being pushed down by a massive build-up of dried seagull poo. If you weren’t really concentrating, and you couldn’t smell, you might have thought it was yellow tinged snow. I could just make out a figure through the window that had to be Bobby. By the looks of his torch beam bouncing all over the place, he was already busy. I meant to bang on the door with my fist, but Bobby must have heard my wheezing. He threw open the door before I could knock.

  “Did you bring everything, the peroxide, bleach, paraffin?” Bobby immediately asked, as I fell into the hut and lay soaked and panting on the smelly floor. At least, compared to outside, it was mostly dry.

  “What do you want all this stuff for? We should be worrying about Tony’s brothers. They must’ve taught him everything he knows. When they find out WAD is made up we’re gonna be in big trouble, the worst ever.” I was a little upset that Bobby hadn’t even said “Hello,” or, “Well done,” for slogging through the night carrying twice my body weight.

  “I shall take that as an affirmative. Unpack everything over there,” Bobby ordered, pointing to rickety old table holding a strange assortment of items. Oddest of all was leaning against the wall next to table, a full-sized mannequin that must have been moonlighting as a crash test dummy. It was missing a leg and an arm and the head was really bashed about. Looking at the stuff in the hut I realised Bobby had actually carried even more than me up there.

  “How’d you get all this up here?” I asked staring at the odd collection of junk.

  “Locomotion, I’m not a carrying sort of person,” Bobby said. He looked disdainfully at the bulging rucksacks still painfully strapped to my body and pointed over my shoulder. Standing against the wall behind me was an old pram. I smiled: he was still the Masterminder. We spent hours arranging everything before Bobby finally announced we were finished for the night. It still looked like a big mess to me.

  “What is it?�
� I asked wearily, indicating everything in the hut with open arms.

  “Half-finished, tomorrow night we install the sound system,” Bobby answered very unhelpfully.

  It was close to 4am when we left. Bobby jumped into his pram and rolled off down the hill straight into town. It took me another hour to get home; I kept falling asleep in various comfy ditches and soft hedges.

  Morning came way too quick; it hardly seemed I’d slept at all and my Mickey Mouse alarm clock said it didn’t just seem that way. If anything the weather had got worse. An even bigger rain storm was building up in the nasty lead clouds covering the whole sky. This kind of weather in a film meant something really horrible was about to happen. But we weren’t in a film so I needn’t worry. Only then I remembered Tony’s brothers and what was going to happen tomorrow night and I did worry, quite a lot.

  After school Bobby and I wandered around town getting various puzzled old people to repeat phrases Bobby supplied into my tape recorder. Nothing Bobby asked them to say made any sense.

  “I think we’ve got enough. I’m going home to mix up a tape, I’ll see you at the hut later,” Bobby shouted over his shoulder as he sprinted off home.

  Which was fine with me. I ran home as well and threw myself straight into bed. Just before midnight I headed back up to the hut feeling a little better. I’d slept for a few hours and happily it was only raining in a medium kind of way, with just a light gale trying to blow me over. Without my rucksack ballast from the previous night it was much easier. But with the wind, it was a case of ten steps forward and being picked up and blown back five. Eventually the sanctuary of the smelly hut came into view and the welcoming sight of Bobby’s torchlight leaked out in all directions. Just as before, Bobby got me to hold things, putting them here and moving them over there, until he finally seemed satisfied with whatever it was we were doing.

  “Terry, your moment has come. Are you ready to sacrifice everything for the revolution?”

  “Everything?”

  “Well, your tape-recorder, specifically.”

  “Phew. Sure, for the revolution,” I agreed, very relieved that the price of revolution had been substantially discounted. And then Bobby told me exactly what I’d be doing tomorrow night when he, Tony and his nasty brothers would be visiting the hut. I shivered and it wasn’t because it was cold.

  When the last bell rang on Thursday afternoon I rushed out of school and headed straight for the hut. I was supposed to be dressed for the black-op all in black. But I didn’t have a black top, so I’d improvised with a bin liner I’d carefully tailored into a very stylish Matrix-like long coat stitched with staples. Right now it was in my rucksack along with a pair of my mum’s tights, a big tub of homemade mascara and the Robin half of my Batman and Robin walkie talkie set. I left the head-torch at home: tonight I was in stealth mode and it was a perfect night for a black-op. There was no moon and the wind was howling and sleet-laced.

  After a frantic search around the back of the hut I eventually found the coil of electric cable we’d hidden far too well the previous night. As I unwound the wire I carefully walked backwards, and kept my eye out for a place to hide and wait. In the dark I could hardly see my feet as I edged away from the hut. Eventually I found a less horribly muddy spot far enough away and quickly started to change into my mission gear. It was an awkward exercise. I had to stop myself sinking into the half-bog while getting into my bin-liner top, applying liberal helpings of mascara over any exposed skin and then pulling my mums tights down over my head. My mascara got a bit muddy, but it was probably a more authentic if smellier concoction. I quickly found that adopting a spread-eagled position face down in the mud stopped the sinking but increased the drowning. After a while I found a happy balance by resting my face on the rucksack. Inside the rucksack, out of the rain, I held the walkie-talkie in one hand and a big three-position switch on the end of the cable in the other. I lay in the freezing mud trying to shiver quietly, hoping it would be over soon.

  About an hour later a crackle on my walkie-talkie woke me up. I spat out some mud that had run under the tights, held my breath and waited for the first signal. Bobby had the Batman half of the Batman and Robin walkie-talkie set hidden inside his coat on permanent transmit.

  “What if he’s got a gun, we should’ve told the police.” I could hear every word but I couldn’t see anything at all. It sounded like George speaking.

  “Shut up fatty,” Tony whispered with his usual undertone of menace.

  “What now?” I instantly recognised the lovely Madge.

  The Power 3 were all out there, so maybe Tony’s brothers hadn’t been able to make it. I started to relax a bit when an older voice jumped out of my little speaker.

  “Is that the place?”

  “Yes… in there, he tortured me, it was a nightmare,” Bobby answered nervously, obviously talking to one of the brothers. Poor Bobby, he must be terrified.

  “No need to get the police involved. He’s obviously suffering some kind of post-trauma effects,” a gentle voice suggested. Brother Two, I wondered?

  “Exactly, we’ll just talk to him, it’ll all be OK,” Brother One added in a soothing gentle voice.

  “What… you’re not going to smash him up?” an incredulous Tony blurted.

  “Of course not, violence never solved anything. That’s the first thing you learn in the catering corp.”

  “What happened to you two?” Tony asked, obviously stunned by his brother’s response.

  “We grew up, we’ve cooked in a war zone.”

  “Someone’s at the window,” Bobby screamed, breaking me out of my shock at the brother’s unexpected attitude. It took me a second to recognise ‘at the window’ was my first signal, and then another moment to remember what I was supposed to do. I turned the switch to position one. The whole hut lit up with bright lights.

  “Look, in the window, its him, he’s huge,” George spluttered.

  “Hey, mate, we just wanna talk, we wanna help,” Brother One called out.

  “You’ll never take me alive. Revolution, playground revolution, freedom for the kids, no more bullying,” came out of the hut in a strange mix of grumpy old voices.

  “How many of them are in there? Madge asked in a quiet voice.

  “He’s obviously very disturbed, let me try. Mr WAD,” Brother One sympathetically called out, “we know what it’s like. All those memories, no one at home understands. We’ll help you, we just want to talk.”

  How about some nice chicken soup?” Brother Two added.

  “He’s got something in his hand,” Bobby screamed as loud as he could, which was my second signal. I turned the switch once more.

  “Get back. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. In death I’ll be a hundred times stronger, the force is with me. The Power 3 will know no peace till they repent,” boomed out of the hut in a zoo of pensioner’s voices.

  “The ‘force’? ‘Power 3’? The poor man’s completely lost it, maybe we should call the police,” Brother One suggested sadly.

  “He need’s stomping,” Tony insisted.

  “Yeh, the police, good idea,” George added enthusiastically.

  “This is… odd,” Madge added suspiciously.

  “I’ll be a… martyr… for the children, the poor… downtrodden… children.” The words came out of the hut in very decrepit wobbly voice, regularly punctuated with chesty coughing.

  “A good scotch broth would really help that cough,” Brother One shouted.

  “Forget the cooking, start the thumping,” Tony shouted.

  “He’s got a bomb,” Bobby screamed.

  Signal number three. I moved the switch to the last position, but nothing happened.

  “I don’t see anything, what’re you talking about? He’s not moved a finger since the lights went on,” Brother One said with obvious puzzlement at Bobby’s outburst.

  “He’s got a bomb, a bomb, a bomb, a big bomb,” Bobby shouted till he was hoarse.

  “Lik
e the cake?” Brother Two asked.

  “Cake? Forget bloody cake, he threatened me, he’s a… a… a…. bully,” Tony screamed.

  I flicked the switch back and forth ferociously, but still nothing happened. In desperation, I threw it down on the rucksack and jumped up and down on it. The next moment I was flying backwards, way out into the bog, and landed with a sort of big plop. Following right behind me was a thunderous roar. When I’d shaken my head clear and stopped myself from sinking I could see the hut was ablaze. Giant flames were shooting way up into the sky. Dragging myself through the mud with a sort of butterfly stroke, it took me quite a few minutes to get back to the rucksack. The walkie-talkie, which was looking a bit melted and very muddy, was dead. The blazing hut lit up the surrounding area but I could only see Bobby in the orange glow. He was on his knees, head in his hands with his forehead pressed to the ground, and he was shaking slightly. I grabbed my rucksack and carefully crawled over to Bobby, keeping an eye out for the Power 3 and Tony’s brothers.

  “You’re alive… but very singed. Good, one martyr’s plenty. Too much peroxide,” were the first slightly hysterical words Bobby uttered when he looked up with big wet eyes and saw me wriggling across the mud towards him. The smoke was probably getting to him; he wiped his eyes on his coat sleeve and we both stood up. Quite unexpectedly Bobby gave me a great big hug which lasted a while. I guessed he was wiping his muddy hands on my back, which was OK, since I still had my camouflage bin liner on, though the front was hanging in tatters.

  “Where’s everyone else?” I asked, still a bit dazed from the bang.

  “They ran. We should go too, someone’s bound to have heard the explosion. We’ve got to see McFont,” Bobby commanded, fully recovered from the smoke and the blast.

  “What, why McFont, when?”

  “Now,” Bobby insisted.

  The two of us stumbled off back towards the town and the home of Mr McFont, editor of the daily Small Island International Vanity Times.